WEST LEBANON — Public school officials on the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley are largely united in opposition to the state’s open enrollment law, which they said threatens major spending increases without input from district residents.
The open enrollment law has been on the books since 1995, but it was given new life last October by a state Supreme Court ruling that held that a public school district that does not set an open enrollment policy must pay if a student opts to attend a school in another district.
In most districts, voters this March will consider warrant articles that would allow students from another district to attend one of their schools, while at the same time restricting local students from defecting to another district. The restrictions are designed to protect taxpayers from unexpected expenses and to preserve local control.
“In general, we’ve talked about sending zero, because that protects us the most,” Lebanon School Board Chairwoman Lilian Maughan said in an interview with half a dozen Upper Valley school leaders last week.
In the interview, arranged by Lebanon Superintendent Amy Allen, the administrators and school board members expressed concern that open enrollment constitutes a further effort by the state to sow chaos in public schools.
“I feel like this is just another way to throw a wrench into the system,” Nancy Glynn, a member of the Kearsarge Regional School District Board who lives in Sutton, N.H., said.
Under the law, a district must make at least one of its schools available to students from other New Hampshire districts. A policy can stipulate the number of open spaces, and the district also can decide whether it will permit any students to leave for another district.
This last provision, a loophole in the law, is included in nearly all the open enrollment policy proposals that will go before voters at annual meetings this spring.
At the deliberative session on Jan. 10, voters in the seven-town Kearsarge district approved a policy under which it would accept 30 students at the district’s high school, but allow none to leave for other districts.
Voters in Plainfield and Cornish, Claremont, Newport, Grantham, Lebanon and Haverhill will consider similar measures at their annual meetings.
Under the open enrollment law, if a student leaves a district for another public district, the “sending” district has to pay 80% of the tuition cost to the receiving district. The tuition payment could saddle a sending district with a substantial bill.
Further, a sending district would have to pay the full cost of any special education services a student receives in the receiving district, without having a say in what those services are or how they’re delivered, Alison Mastin, chairwoman of the Kearsarge School Board, said in a phone interview.
It is unclear to public school officials whether open enrollment overrides other agreements among school districts. Public districts have tuition contracts with one another, and state law has enabled Authorized Regional Enrollment Area, or AREA, agreements among districts since at least the 1960s.
Grantham, Lebanon and Plainfield have had an agreement in place under which Plainfield sends its high school students and Grantham sends grades 7-12 to Lebanon schools. Officials in those districts are concerned that open enrollment could jeopardize that agreement, which has been in place since 1967 and was renewed most recently in 2021.
“We feel the agreement has done its job,” Christine Downing, Grantham’s superintendent, said. “We’re concerned about what open enrollment could do to longstanding agreements like that.”
The AREA pact is designed to set up stable relationships, both for educating students and to maintain steady taxation. Open enrollment would interfere with the districts’ ability to contain costs, Downing said.
The agreement also spells out instructional goals, including differentiated services for students on individual education plans, or IEPs. There’s a relationship between services and spending. Under open enrollment, there’s no such certainty, Downing said.
Benton, N.H., which operates no schools, has a tuition deal to send students to Haverhill Cooperative School District, Dolores Fox, superintendent of Haverhill’s SAU 23, said in a phone interview. Open enrollment should have no effect on that contract, she said.
“According to what my understanding is from legal counsel right now, tuition agreements come first,” she said.
Officials in the Dresden Interstate School District, which oversees secondary schools for Hanover and Norwich, and the Hanover School District have opted not to put an article before voters, which could leave Hanover and Norwich taxpayers open to unforeseen expenses if students opt for other districts.
“We are not adding a warrant article around open enrollment at this time,” Hanover School Board Chairwoman Kelly McConnell said in an emailed statement, “as there are so many unknowns and we are awaiting further guidance from the state legislature, particularly as it pertains to the complexities of our interstate school district.”
Lebanon plans to enable open enrollment at Mt. Lebanon School, one of the district’s two K-4 schools, and the one with smaller class sizes. The school would accept 1% of its enrollment, Allen said. The AREA agreement with Grantham and Plainfield affects only the middle and high schools.
“We designed (the proposed warrant article) to protect the AREA agreement,” Allen said.
The Grantham School Board will begin to consider open enrollment at its meeting on Tuesday, Downing said.
“The Grantham board would prefer not even to engage with this,” Downing said. But the consensus belief is that to do nothing would be to invite a legal challenge.
Plainfield will consider a warrant article allowing a 20% enrollment influx at its K-8 school, which amounts to roughly 37 students, Superintendent Kyle Riley said.
Cornish voters will consider allowing 10%, or around 13 students, at its K-8 school. Both measures would allow no students to leave.
Claremont school officials are proposing to allow 10% of its enrollment to come in, but will send out no students.
And in Newport, a warrant article would not allow any Newport student to attend another open enrollment district but would allow Newport to accept up to 5% of its enrollment of 700.
Open enrollment has been a feature of education laws in other states for decades, New Hampshire Board of Education Chairman Drew Cline wrote in a newsletter Friday for the Josiah Bartlett Center, the conservative think-tank he also leads. School districts are beginning to develop marketing plans for their schools, he noted.
“With a universal open-enrollment law looking more likely to pass this year, planning for the creation of an open market for public education services has spread,” Cline wrote.
Local school officials see open enrollment as of a piece with other legislative initiatives in education in recent years. The Legislature’s Republican majority has expanded Education Freedom Accounts that allow state funding to follow a child almost anywhere, while at the same time announcing plans to ignore the November 2023 state Supreme Court ruling that found state aid to public education is unconstitutionally low.
Open enrollment “pits us against each other,” Maughan said. Larger districts with more resources would benefit, while smaller school districts would struggle to weather it.
And enabling open enrollment, writ large, would make it easy for parents of means to drive children to different schools, which would raise equity issues, school officials said.
While districts are moving to put in place open enrollment policies that protect them, the Legislature is moving to make open enrollment universal across public schools. State Sen. Tim Lang, R-Sanborton, introduced legislation to enshrine open enrollment statewide last year. The bill, SB 101, is still on the table in Concord. Sen. Dan Innis, whose district includes several towns in the Kearsarge district, is a co-sponsor.
“To me, it’s a dismantling of public schools,” Downing said. She noted that New Hampshire regularly ranks in the top seven among states in measures of public school effectiveness.
“That’s what all of this is about,” Maughan said. “It’s hard to ignore the way that the current Legislature is trying to take apart bit by bit our local schools.”
Valley News Correspondent Patrick O’Grady contributed reporting.